without love nothing is worth

In this year more than ever God has led me to meditate on love. It is possible that one reaches a certain age and perhaps begins to reevaluate his life and see how he is in the important things in life. It was the year that we also celebrated 25 years of marriage, and it was the year that one of our daughters got married. And it was the year where for the first time we are experiencing what it is to be grandparents. And all those things make you think deeply about how you got there and how you can improve for the future.

And I have discovered that the greatest treasure I have is the love of my heavenly Father. It is the awareness of his presence in my life, the fact that he is the one who pilots my plane and that all aspects of my life are under his control and that nothing escapes him, even what I do not see he sees. . And I want to tell you tonight that the love of God is invariable. It has always been and always will be upon you. None of us is a mistake and none of us escapes the loving eyes of our Father.

Our God is a God who seeks, he seeks his children with zeal and passion and wants to have a personal and intimate relationship with each one of you. The word says in Jeremiah, with eternal love I have loved you. It is a love that never ends. The love of our Father is manifested in all aspects of our life. It begins with the vision and the future, the destiny that he has placed in each one of us. It manifests itself in his forgiveness, in his attention to all the details of our lives, in providing for all our needs, and even in his consolation and affirmation of who each one of us is.

And I have learned that God is very pleased with what we do for his Kingdom, but he is even more delighted with who we are in it, he cares who we are in our privacy, what our motivations and attitudes are. And the moments where I feel the love of God and the presence of God the most is not in the moments of doing but in the moments of being, when I am his daughter and in those moments in which I concentrate on knowing who I am in him and receiving his tender words of love and his loving embrace and even his word of correction. So those are the most important, most significant moments in my Christian walk.

This is the first time I think we do this duo. We have to do it more often as I tell you. I'm always telling you that you should preach more, right? Amen. So I am willing to translate whenever you want.

And I want us to go to the word in the passage par excellence on love, it would obviously be First Corinthians 13 and we are going to first read from the first to verse 3 which says like this:

“… if I speak human and angelic tongues and I do not have love, I become like resounding metal or a resonant cymbal. And if I had prophecy and understood all mysteries and all science, and if I had all faith in such a way that I could move mountains, and I have no love, I am nothing. And if I distributed all my goods to feed the poor, and if I gave my body to be burned and I have no love, it is of no use to me….”

So that is a confirmation of what I was sharing previously that no matter how great what we do is, it is worth absolutely nothing if it is not gestated and bathed in love. And we continue reading in the same passage, First Corinthians 13, verse 4 to the first part of verse 8 and there it says:

"... love is long-suffering, it is benign, love does not envy, love is not boastful, it is not puffed up, it does not do anything wrong, it does not seek its own, it does not get irritated, it does not hold grudges, it does not enjoy injustice the more you enjoy the truth. He suffers everything, he believes everything, he hopes everything, he bears everything….”

And the last part that we are going to read says, "... love never ceases to be..."

This is the love that I aspire to have in my life. Perhaps many of you have heard that love is not a feeling, right? Although part is feeling but it is rather a decision. Love has to be based on a genuine desire to honor God and when it comes from that source of God's inexhaustible love is when it becomes, it has supernatural power. Never underestimate the power of the acts of love that you do in the name of the Lord.

And at the end of the year I want to extend three challenges to you in relation to what love is. The first is dedicate yourself to knowing your Father as he is. Try to discard the worldly image that you have acquired in your life about who God is. We all have to do that because we don't know God as he really is and we often act and react against God in ways that, as we have learned in our lives, based on our experiences in life.

So I want to encourage you to open your heart to God like the heart of a child. Greg was alluding to that very principle. How a little boy approaches his loving father; he does it freely, with abandon, with confidence. She climbs on her daddy's lap and hugs her daddy's lap, looks for protection when she needs it, for comfort when she needs it, brings her damaged little toy for her daddy to fix, and many times we've learned to deal with it. to God with a lot of formalism, although what he wants is that we go to him like a child.

So that is the first challenge I want to do, dedicate yourself to knowing God, the attributes of God as he is, because in that you will have freedom.

Now it came to my mind when I received the baptism of the Holy Spirit what the Lord repeated to me over and over again was the phrase, father's love, father's love is. For about an hour God repeated that to me, father's love, father's love it is. And it was when I began to treat God like my real dad because before that, for me he was a formal, distant God, a judge. And from then on everything changed, there I had the freedom to approach him as his little daughter and to call him for the first time my aba, my dad. In my mind I knew that this was the image I should have and from there, God has continued to reveal himself to me and has made me hungry to look for him as my dad and he has made me a much better person because of that because he has given me completed and set me free.

The second challenge that I want to extend to you is that you do not settle for how you love today. Aspire to grow in love. Evaluate where you have to change, do you love like that description we just read from First Corinthians 13? Acknowledge your faults. You know that many of us get stuck and settle for a mediocre love when in reality we have all the resources of heaven to be able to love as God loves, and continue to grow in God's love.

So that would be, ask God to transform your heart so that you can learn to love like a child. A principle of counseling is that if there is no change, there is no change. So if you want better relationships with your spouse, with your children, with your siblings, with your co-workers, neighbors, anyone, then you have to make changes. So that's the other challenge.

And within that too, don't wait for others to change for you to change. Many times we get stuck in the same situation because we point to the other as the first to make the change, when in reality we can start. And the wonderful thing is sometimes when we do that, we incorporate positive changes in love, in dealing with others, we see that this releases a disposition perhaps from God for him to act in the situation because we are being obedient to God to do what he has commanded to do.

So the first challenge is dedicate yourself to knowing God as he is, your Father as he is. Aspire to grow in love, and the third is to grow in your demonstration of love towards others. Each one of us is an ambassador of the Lord's love. A home where love reigns, where grace reigns, is the best testimony that there can be of the transforming power of Christ and it is the place where these children who were here at the forefront and so many more will learn to love.

So, dear brother, dear sister, no matter your age, your marital status right now you have, in a short time, 365 days of opportunities in front of you to show genuine love.

So I encourage you to make the most of each day. Amen. Well, let's pray for it to be so. Why don't we stand up? We ask that the Lord make this possible, grow in the genuine love of God, manifest it and also express it.

Thank you Lord, we present ourselves Lord before you, just as we are and we ask you, Lord, that you help us better understand how to get to know you as you truly are. Father, we present ourselves before you as we are and we ask that you make changes in our life this year so that we can be more sensitive to your love.

Lord, open our hearts to be more sensitive to your love. Father, help us to grow in being like children to reach you as you want us to reach you, with abandon, with dedication, with joy, with love. I ask you, Lord, that in each home there be a transformation first by the power of your love, by the eternity that you put in the human being, by your grace on each life. And Lord, for the changes that each one of us will establish in his home, in all our relationships, so that we truly bear witness to your love.

Help us to love, Lord. Father, when it is difficult for us, help us to love. Help us to love the one who has hurt us, and I also ask you, Lord, to knock down all barriers that prevent us from loving as you want us to love. Father, may your healing love be the mark of each person here, of each family, Lord, teach us, Lord. We cannot in ourselves, in our strength, we depend on you, like children we sit on your lap, we ask you, Lord, for your love and we take refuge in your love, we delight in your love and we prepare to love others too. Thank you, Father, amen, in the name of Jesus, amen, amen. Glory to the name of the Lord. Good foundation to start the year remembering the most basic of spiritual principles: the love of God in our life manifesting it, feeling it and learning the love of God and seeing God as he is. Glory to the Lord.